High speed computer memories, in particular cache memory performance is strongly influenced by the amount of time necessary to fill the cache memory with new data required by the processor. The sooner such a read operation can be started in main memory, the less time it will take to fill the cache. The influence of read latency on performance is derived from the read latency times the cache miss rate. This is the amount of time by which an average processor cycle will be increased due to cache read latency.